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#231
danramos, OS2008 (esp. Diablo) was essentially born dead, offering only minor updates to some parts and it is alreadyfast becoming irrelevant, but the real hopes of Internet Tablet (770 & N8x0 series) users must lie with Mer.

With there being some actual momentum behind the associated Moblin and Ubuntu efforts (including Nokia's fremantle efforts for their next phonish devices), Mer could possibly grow into the platform for NIT's that Maemo wasn't allowed to become.

As Stskeeps mentions above, even the old hardware would benefit from having open 3D drivers for Mer.

Think I'll quote Quim's quip in whole for posterity...


Originally Posted by qgil View Post
Hi, I will use this thread to send updates on one my committed tasks in the maemo.org June sprint:

9.06-14 Plan for the OMAP2 acceleration drivers

There have been some discussions between the Maemo team and TI in the past months, and we seem to be moving to actions now.

This hasn't moved faster for many reasons, one of them being that this is not the most important item in the priority list shared by both companies. Still, I must say I'm impressed about the willingness to come up with a solution for the community shown by both sides. Really remarkable for a project based on 'legacy hardware' (from the platform development point of view of these companies) with zero revenue and actually some additional costs.

The current idea is that TI or an associated partner will provide either an OSS implementation of the driver known to contain some bugs or a closed implementation with probably better performance (although still not 100% commercial quality) or both. It would a one time delivery with no commitment for additional support.

My take in these discussions has been that an OSS driver is always preferrable since it would give to the community the chances to improve it, as opposed to a closed binary. Ther current idea is to try to implement in the OSS driver the fixes that were implemented in the closed one, tidy up the code a bit and make sure all the licensing is correct.

The scenario of community developers signing NDAs has been discarded. Note that both drivers were developed by two different companies that now they need to share their code. It is much easier to deal with this situation by a developer in one of these companies sharing already an NDA.

Everybody is quite busy but they are trying to arrange the time needed to complete the task. No deadlines and not even a commitment, but the optimist in me thinks that we could have some drivers available during the Summer... or perhaps before the Maemo Summit if unknown problems appear.
 
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#232
Don't forget Mer
Mer by itself gives a lot of life to our N8x0s (and even 770s ...)
And if we ALSO have a graphic driver that we can use in Mer all the better

And Mer provides up-to-date components !
 
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#233
Originally Posted by Peet View Post
danramos, OS2008 (esp. Diablo) was essentially born dead, offering only minor updates to some parts and it is alreadyfast becoming irrelevant, but the real hopes of Internet Tablet (770 & N8x0 series) users must lie with Mer.

With there being some actual momentum behind the associated Moblin and Ubuntu efforts (including Nokia's fremantle efforts for their next phonish devices), Mer could possibly grow into the platform for NIT's that Maemo wasn't allowed to become.

As Stskeeps mentions above, even the old hardware would benefit from having open 3D drivers for Mer.

Think I'll quote Quim's quip in whole for posterity...
All true and I agree. I'm very impatient, critical and grumpy by nature, though, so please take what I say with a dose of understanding that from the get-go. heheh

Will it be as easy to install Mer on an N800 like it was to reflash Maemo? I haven't tried it yet but I didn't get that impression. Remember that there's a lot of family and friends that I keep up-to-date on this platform and I would hope that they could also benefit from an easy set-up. Not everyone that bought and loves their N8x0 is as technical as the folks in this forum might assume.

I've never seen Mer running and I'm not able to spend a lot of time fiddling around with the N800 as much as I used to, these days. I would prefer that it works and functions well as the device I need it for: ss someone else put it, I use my N800 as a pocket Linux box.. and it's excellent as such and I love it for that. I just wish it had the benefit of having community support for updated kernels and drivers a whole lot sooner along the way while I'd been using it instead of always feeling crestfallen to find out some component was just as well as crippled.

It's very likely that I'll buy something newer soon, very likely not the new N900, from the sound of it. Maybe Mer will run this nebulous new device, maybe not, but it doesn't really make me feel better about the last couple of years of closed-minded drivers, a stale kernel and the promises of a true Linux device.
 
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#234
@danramos: I understand your sentiments, as I've sometimes been frustrated with the limitations (or silly (to me) defaults) of Diablo, but I'd challenge you to find a mass-produced handheld product from a large corporation that's more open than what we have; it's not perfect, but it's pretty darn good, considering what else is out there. With Mer, from what I've seen so far, virtually all of my complaints is gone. Now, with Quim's news, /all/ of them are!
I would like to sincerely thank Nokia, TI, and any other parties involved for finding a way to make this work. I'm sure I don't fully understand the business-related difficulties involved, however, this has not only made my day, but has significantly raised my opinion of Nokia, and especially TI, and has shown real commitment to the community. Not many companies would do this...
also @danramos: OT, but in regards to your question about Mer, it's not ready for non-technical users yet (it's still in development), but I flashing Mer should be no more difficult to do than Maemo, and although installing to a card (which I would recommend) is a bit more complicated, it's a one-time thing.

So yeah... YAY!
 

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#235
Originally Posted by danramos View Post
I wish I could give this more praise but considering how late in the product line this is coming, I can't really fully appreciate it as much.
The motivation for providing the acceleration drivers is not tied to the launch of the N800 & N810 hardware but to the release of Maemo 5, when the official platform does make use of software acceleration.

We will consider this mission completed in good time if the Mer project can use these drivers in their Fremantle community edition when Maemo 5 is released.

I understand you would like to have seen these steps being done before, but there is actually a relation between the business value of those drivers 2 years ago and the possibility to release them as open source now.
 

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#236
Quim:
Does this development have any bearing on support/docs for the other devices mentioned on the "Drivers Justification" wiki page, or just the PowerVR module? I'm still ecstatic even if it doesn't, but I wanted to clarify
 

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#237
Originally Posted by qgil View Post
The motivation for providing the acceleration drivers is not tied to the launch of the N800 & N810 hardware but to the release of Maemo 5, when the official platform does make use of software acceleration.

We will consider this mission completed in good time if the Mer project can use these drivers in their Fremantle community edition when Maemo 5 is released.

I understand you would like to have seen these steps being done before, but there is actually a relation between the business value of those drivers 2 years ago and the possibility to release them as open source now.
So let me get this right... Diablo and Chinook won't ever benefit from this? And Mer just "might" if they can use it?
 

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#238
Originally Posted by gerbick View Post
So let me get this right... Diablo and Chinook won't ever benefit from this? And Mer just "might" if they can use it?
Diablo is already finished with, and Chinook more so. If I'm understanding Quim correctly, what he's saying is that the timing was right for this to be released to the Mer project, since 3D in Mer as a "Fremantle Community Edition" (emphasis) adds value to the older products (N8x0) in light of the new release, as opposed to just releasing the driver independently because people wanted it. Correct me if I'm wrong, Quim

Last edited by jaem; 2009-06-25 at 07:48. Reason: clarity
 

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#239
Originally Posted by gerbick View Post
So let me get this right... Diablo and Chinook won't ever benefit from this? And Mer just "might" if they can use it?
Keep in mind there's still work going on to be able to push community updates to Diablo. When someone picks up the task of maintaining a variant of Diablo, I bet 3d driver would be within reach easily. Also, this 3d driver would obviously not be Mer-only.
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As you go on to other communities, remember to build them around politeness, respect, trust and humility. Be wary of poisonous people and deal with them before they end up killing your community.. Seen it happen to too many IRC channels, forums, open source projects.
 

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#240
Originally Posted by jaem View Post
Diablo is already finished with, and Chinook more so. If I'm understanding Quim correctly, what he's saying is that the timing was right for this to be released to the Mer project, since 3D in Mer as a "Fremantle Community Edition" (emphasis) adds value to the older products (N8x0) in light of the new release, as opposed to just releasing the driver independently because people wanted it. Correct me if I'm wrong, Quim
I truly hope you're wrong; however thank you for the (possible) clarification and information.

If anything, this is really a bigger "FU" to any prior owner/purchaser of their hardware and dropping the support so darn quick is... unbelievable. To have a part of an included piece of hardware closed off and never utilized is nigh-inexcusable and brings forth a bit of rage from me honestly.

If this is the case, for 2 years they held back their own hardware for really no reason - sorry, but crippling your own machine makes zero business sense - only to half-*** release an update that did not update a browser or most parts of the OS in a major way other than to... well, have a bunch of beta testers in a community situation is just a sick experiment at best.

I have a good mind to send my machines back to Nokia, with me paying for the postage and a nice little note of "FU back, Nokia".

I hate to sound bitter - ok, I'm going to roll with it for this once - but to allow your established base to languish and have the community become bigger heroes than the originator of the software and hardware and to hold back this part of the software that could have aided people 2 years ago... makes no sense whatsoever.
 

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